The Last Human IV - Ch. 22 - As It Was, As It Seems (Patreon)

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On Cyre, she always felt so small when gazing up at the statue of the Emperor on his Everthrone. On Thrass, she had tasted the truth of her insignificance as she followed the small god through the Templelands, trekking across miles of sediment-covered machinery that powered the Divine Makers’ eldest Gate.

But here, in this quiet and forgotten station, Agraneia had never felt so mortal.

Once, the Makers had lived here. They had breathed this very air. They had worked here, congregated here, and built miraculous machines in these hallowed halls.

The touch of the gods lingered in every sweeping slope of the high, metal walls, in every perfectly-placed tile that made up the floor. Their breath still whispered in the life support systems. And when she gazed out through the great rose-shaped viewport, Agraneia could almost feel them gazing with her, into the pitch black.

At least Agraneia wasn’t the only one who felt this dizzying sensation.

Khadam’s lips parted in wonder, as she tilted her head back to admire the immaculate architecture, the almost muscular sinews of the arches interlacing with each other, the enveloping symmetry of the hallways, the near-organic curve of the walls.

“It’s been so long,” Khadam said. The human unsealed her boots from the Gate, cold mist still curling under her heels as she stepped off the disc. Agraneia followed her to the great, dark window that gazed upon nothing but blackness.

“Another Conclave?” Agraneia asked. “How deep are we?”

“We’re not underground,” Khadam said. “Out there is space.”

Agraneia frowned. “Then where are all the stars?”

“Look closer.”

Agraneia squinted, and leaned forward until her helmet clicked against the window. It took her a long time to see them: scattered pinpricks of light, so dim they were almost invisible. If she lost focus of one, it disappeared into the black veil of nothing.

“Why are they so dark?”

“We’re on an asteroid station,” Khadam said, “You know what an asteroid is? Good. Well, this station was built inside a rogue asteroid. It wanders a distant void more vast than you can imagine. We are hundreds of millions of light years from the nearest galaxy. The starlight is too weak to shine like the night sky over your worlds. We’re inside one of the loneliest objects in the universe.”

An unwelcome voice crowed in her thoughts, You know all too well what that’s like, don’t you, cyran?

“Welcome to Power Station 15,” Khadam continued, “Of course, this station has nothing to do with power. We built it here to keep it hidden from the Sovereign, because despite the Sovereign’s many eyes, it can’t watch every object in the universe. There were dozens of these stations, scattered across the voids, and some closer to the Milky Way. We hoped if we spread out, we’d be harder to find—harder to kill.”

“A good tactic.”

“The plan wasn’t perfect. But, then again,” Khadam clanked her boot on the metal floor, “This one’s still standing.”

“And so are you,” Agraneia said.

“Yes,” Khadam gave her a sad smile, half-hidden by the reflection of the Station’s lighting on her helmet’s visor.

They gazed in silence, trying to find the dim stars twinkling in the unknowable distance. Khadam broke the spell with a deep inhalation, almost as if she was breathing in the Station’s atmosphere.

“Life support is still running,” a tinge of nerves evident in the human’s voice. “Temperature is optimal. Air mixture, too. All of it.”

“Isn’t that good?”

“Unexpected,” Khadam turned her back on the window, frowning down the empty hallways and chewing on her lip. “These places weren’t like the Vaults or the Cold Chambers. They weren’t meant to run on their own for thousands of years.”

“The Black Library was still operational. At least, until…” She didn’t want to finish the sentence, didn’t want to think about the obliterated ruins of her home planet ever again. Nor, her black-feathered friend she lost when the Swarm came.

“All the Light Dams are different. Auster introduced the Historians to maintain the Dams’ functions, because he wanted to ensure the Scars were contained, long after he left. There were never any xenos on this station.”

“Ah,” Agraneia grunted. “Then why are you worried?”

Khadam shot her a look. The line of metal running down her lower lip glinted in th e recessed lights above, perfectly aligned with the furrows of worry carved across her brow. “I don’t know,” she said. “I think I’m trying not to get my hopes up.”

“For?”

“This station was once full of researchers and cold smiths. They were working on new ways to harness the Light. Portable extractors, and other things, but that was thousands of years ago.” Khadam shook her head, as if even she couldn’t quite wrap her mind around the number. “And yet, we found an extractor. On that last Dam. Maybe if we’re lucky…”

“We might find another one?”

“Or the parts to build one.” Khadam reached a hand behind her own head, as if to scratch at some spot on her back, but the metal of her suit and her gloves prevented her from completing the action. She shrugged her shoulders, uncomfortably.

“What’s wrong?”

“I used to know some of the cold smiths who came here. Tao and Tomas. Dan Zhang and Cee. It’s stupid. We had these chairs, and one time we put repulsors on them, and we raced them down the hall, just there.” The human swallowed loud enough that her helmet picked up the sound. “It looks the same.”

“Hmm.”

“There’s a fabricator this way,” Khadam said, leading them down one hallway and up the next. Two huge blast doors stood in their way. They were made of a familiar, black metal.

“It’s the same material as the dam,” Agraneia said.

“It’s a ferrous alloy made with molecularized Light. The metal attracts the Light, and the patterns condense and dissipate it, instead of letting it float freely. Which means, maybe the doors still work—”

A light blinked in Khadam’s helmet, and the huge doors slid open with barely a whisper. Light flooded into the hall, blasting them both with waves of shimmering brilliance. Agraneia shielded her face with both hands, and took a step back, though her visor dimmed automatically. The alien glow showed through the gaps between her gloved fingers, and in the next room she saw a great shape, like a curved fruit, hanging from a single, thread-like stem in the center of a large, circular chamber. Pure Light burned within the curved shape, blistering through its black metal skin, rolling and twisting as if the Light was alive.

“What?” Khadam whispered.

“What?” Agraneia echoed, not understanding.

“How?”

“How, what?”

“They didn’t. They couldn’t have. Could they?”

And before Agraneia could figure out what it was, Khadam walked into the room, letting all that Light envelop her.

And even though the Light made no sound at all, Agraneia felt the need to shout. “Khadam, wait!”

Not even the voices spoke, now. No laughter, no screams, no jeers from the murdered dead. No faces pressed out of the shadows, nor did any hallucinations drip from the ceiling to fill her nostrils with the scent of wet swamp and warm blood. There was only the steady whisper of the air through the vents, and the gentle murmur of mechanical wheels and gears, sliding frictionlessly over each other as that burning, curving object made slow revolutions at the center of the room. It poured trails of sparkling mist, glittering every gemstone color, to crawl and cotton across the floor.

Whatever the Makers had built here, they had learned to contain it. Maybe, Agraneia thought. But still, her mind itched, and she stood warily at the edge of the chamber, spikes of uncertainty pinning her to the wall.

Khadam, however, circled around the great, hanging object at the center of the room. The stem that held it was too delicate for a piece of metal so heavy, so ripe, nearly bursting with Light. But Khadam seemed far more awed than worried.

“Rodeiro said it would never work,” she whispered reverently, “And Tao had the theory all worked out, except for the overload problem, and the control.” Khadam bit her lip, the shining strip of metal sliding under her teeth, as her eyes raced back and forth as information that only she could see scrolled through her vision. “But they did it. They cut open the fabric, they found a way to hold it open—”

“Divine One,” Agraneia growled from the far side of the chamber, “What did they do?”

“They made their own Scar. Their own… There’s so much energy here. But how did they hide it? And what about the threshold—oh. Oh, I see.” Muttering, Khadam’s eyes flicked up and down, side to side, as if scraping through vast troves of information, “They dump it back into the system. Wouldn’t that make it unstable? No. No, it’s regulated by—but that shouldn’t work. Then … incredible …”

Agraneia frowned around the room, trying to make sense of the baffling appliances that lined the walls, or the unknowable instruments that hung in perfect order over workstations untouched for ages. Mist curled at her boots. She reached for it, with the fingers of her liquid metal hand, half-expecting to see the hallucinations of corpse-fingers, reaching back. Nothing. Somehow, that didn’t make her feel any better.

“This is everything,” Khadam exclaimed, “With this, with this, there’s no end to what we could build. If I could transplant this into the Ark, we could manufacture all the extractors. We could build a whole fleet. We could—”

Something hollow clanged out in the hallway, like a metal bowl crashing and spinning on the floor.

At first, Agraneia almost relaxed, thinking that her hallucinations had finally come back to haunt her. Then, she noticed Khadam’s face—frozen. Eyes wide.

“Uh,” Agraneia said, “Did you hear that, too?”

Khadam nodded, wordlessly.

“Get behind me,” Agraneia said, holding up her liquid arm, impulsing it to widen and flatten out into a shield. It came so naturally to her now, and she didn’t bat an eye as her arm flattened out and formed into a tall, narrow shield.

They crept down the hall like that, as quietly as their suits would allow. Now that she was listening, Agraneia could hear voices. Two or three, it was hard to tell, and someone laughing. Human voices. But they were amplified, like they were coming from speakers, and not from actual people.

“An audio device?” Khadam said, “Or some old video, set to loop.”

“Video?” Agraneia asked. “Which one is that, again?”

“Moving pictures, with sound.”

“Ah,” Agraneia rumbled. Khadam had tried to explain to her ancient human culture before, but if it wasn’t a weapon or a defense system, it refused to stick in her mind.

Another peel of laughter echoed down the hall. It was so loud, and near hysterical, that Agraneia crouched and readied her arm into a blade. She wished she had a firearm, but Khadam had said it was too dangerous to bring into a highly-pressurized environment like this station.

“Easy,” Khadam said. “I think it’s a recording. Playing over and over.”

“Then what was that other noise?”

Inside her helmet, Khadam pressed her lips together, and nodded, as if to say, Good point.

Pieces of paper, stuck to the walls with thin strips of some sticky material, flapped on the walls as they padded carefully down the corridor. The sticky strips were gray with dust, and the papers were so thin, Agraneia thought a single breath might crumble them to dust. There were drawings on the papers. Shapes that almost looked like people, but the harder she stared, the less sense she could make of their bodies, their strange poses. Some had too many limbs, or too few digits. Eyes and mouths and noses had undefined edges, as if the artist hadn’t cared to draw them at all. And yet, they had cared enough to stick these to the walls?

“Who drew these?”

“Tomas was always doodling,” Khadam said, though her focus was glued ahead where the lights spilled into the hall, flickering and flashing as whatever video changed and changed again. “He hung the best ones on the walls.”

“He was a strange artist.”

That got her attention. She frowned at Agraneia, then at the walls. “Uh, these are not Tomas’ work.” She tilted her head, “They almost look like—”

Another crashing clang, followed by a metallic rattle. Like someone had dropped another heavy dish. Agraneia held one finger up, motioning for Khadam to keep comms quiet. She crept forward, with the Maker at the rear. Agraneia took the corner by degrees.

“What the hells?”

“What is it?” Khadam asked.

It was a small room, a kitchen and a living room, with three doors, one at each corner. A huge screen took up one wall. A couch sat in front of the screen, and behind that, a kind of table made out of flimsy-looking metal. There were four plates on the table, each piled perfectly with four different, freshly-made meals. One with pink chunks on a pile of pale white noodles, another with leafy greens and nuts, still dewy with water. One bowl of bright orange soup steamed, as if it had been made minutes ago.

And yet, there was no one here.

“Let’s check the bedrooms,” Khadam whispered, her jittery, excited voice crackling inside Agraneia’s helmet.

The first door refused to open. Agraneia used her liquid arm as a pry-bar, and forced it to the side.

“Uh?” she grunted her surprise. Inside, it looked like no bedroom she had ever seen. Instead of four smooth walls, the room was cramped with machinery—vines of wires dripped from a too-high ceiling, dangling with dozens of blinking instrumetns and glass-eyed sensors. Slender metal ribs clawed out from dark recesses, holding stacks of delicate electrical components in their grips. A cold gas hissed up from slats in the floor, sending white tendrils to wrap around fragile, humming devices. Even as Agraneia stood in the doorway, one of the devices began to whine, as if reacting to her presence.

“This,” Agraneia said, “Is a bedroom?”

“No,” Khadam said. The word came out in a single, frosty breath.

“Then, where did your people sleep—”

“Agraneia,” Khadam said, her voice as dead as a frozen lake. “Get out of your suit. Now.”

Agraneia glanced at the external temperature in the corner of her visor. The station was below freezing. She was about to argue, when Khadam said, “This was a trap.”

“What?”

Khadam swallowed, and when she spoke again, her voice was tight with barely-contained terror. “This whole place. It’s fake. You have to get out of your suit, and go through the Gate.”

“What about you?”

“It already has me.”

“Khadam?”

“The Sovereign. It’s in here.”

“I don’t see—”

“Agraneia!” Khadam screamed, “Cut yourself out of that fucking suit right now and get back to the Gate. Leave! Get them all on the Ark and leave! Get them all—”

Suddenly, Khadam’s voice cut out, as if Agraneia had suddenly gone deaf.

But Agraneia could still hear her own breath, pressing close in the strict confines of her helmet.

Something crawled across the ceiling, long and slender and glinting with metal. Agraneia tried to lift her gaze, but her helmet was locked up. Her knees were seized by the grip of the actuators. She wasted no time.

Agraneia sent an impulse to her liquid arm. The chromatic metal rippled, sliding out into a blade covered in metal teeth. Though she couldn’t move her shoulder, the newly-formed blade bent itself backward, and sliced at her own torso. A breath of icy air clapped her in the chest as her breastplate clanged to the floor.

At the same time, something clanked under her feet, and the floor started to move. The grasping ribs and metal fingers jutting out from the walls began to curl inward, packing themselves into neat, even lines and peeling back to reveal layers of heavy machine arms and jaws that seemed to devour the cramped facade of the station.

The doorway was ripped open. The dormitory, laid bare. The walls of the corridor, pulled apart, the art sketches left to flutter and crumble in the grinding movement of the walls.

The teeth of her liquid blade worked furiously at the waist of her suit, and then the thighs and the shins, until the whole thing split open and she stepped out onto the metal floor, sending a cold shock through the soles of her sock-covered feet. Khadam, still inside her own suit, was screaming soundlessly, her face turning red as she mouthed one word over and over. Go.

Fuck that, Agraneia thought. Next to the god’s, her life was meaningless. Her only purpose in this life was to keep Khadam safe—but when she stepped toward Khadam, the floor jerked, buckling Agraneia’s legs and making her fall on hands and knees. Before she could stand up, the ceiling ripped itself open, and a mass of machine arms descended: claws on racks, vice clamps on extending arms, syringes on metallic, insectoid fingers. Hundreds of hands wrapped their metal grip around Khadam’s suit, and in a single, blinding motion, they yanked her up into craterous gap of the ceiling above.

Gone.

Agraneia could only stare, as the dark pit of dread sank into her stomach, burning and hollowing her out. No, she thought. This new reality crushed her in waves, and the harder she tried to reject it, the smaller she became. They had fallen into the palm of the Sovereign’s hand. Agraneia had lost her. There was nothing she could do. Khadam was gone.

But Agraneia was not alone.

Around her, the walls continued to shift and change as the Sovereign pulled away the decorations of this false station. Spherical machine heads pressed out of the gaps of machinery, surrounding her. Their heads were shaggy with wires and hydraulic tubing, and grasping limbs jutted out from metal skin—each limb capped with twitching pincers or bulbous clusters of glass that stared at Agraneia like dull, compound eyes.

“HMMMmmmMMM.” A hundred inhuman voices hummed from the walls, each one a different pitch and timbre, each one slightly out of sync. “Not human. No, not quite. But close.” An electric chitter trilled dizzying circles around the room, as the heads chirped at each other in a language Agraneia would never comprehend.

Agraneia, shivering in the cold, wearing nothing but the underlayers of her suit, crouched. Her heart hammered in her throat, adrenaline coursing through her veins, and when she held her liquid arm up, the blade extended into a double-edged short sword.

“No,” The voice declared in a hundred humming tones. “The body is ideal, but the brain will not suffice.”

Then, the bulbous clusters of glass started to glow red-hot. Agraneia barely had time to impulse a command to her arm, flattening the blade into a buckler shield, before the sizzling crack of energy snapped at her. It was a furious sound, and though it had no force behind it—like the shot of a cannon might—Agraneia could feel its blistering heat even through her liquid arm, and the radiating warmth rolling over her scales. The great machine heads began to swivel and jitter in place, humming as they contemplated how to best end Agraneia’s existence.

“HmmmMMMmmmm,” the machines said. Then, the walls started to slide together.

With the shield still raised, Agraneia ran. With the interior of the station so utterly changed, she didn’t know if she was running in the right direction, but that didn’t matter anymore. Khadam had been right from the start: she had to flee.

Like a living nightmare, the walls of the station began to slide away, revealing huge mechanical struts and dull rock. The device that had harnessed the Scar crumpled into the floor. Another fake machine designed to dazzle and lure. Only then did Agraneia understand the depth of the trap. None of this was real. The art. The voices they’d heard, down the hall. The whole station.

Only the gate was real. And if she could just reach it—

Something slammed into the back of her skull, sending her sprawling across the floor with such a force, she felt the scales of her organic hand break off. For a moment, a bright light eclipsed all of Agraneia’s thoughts—Where am I? Why am I laying here?—while the fake station continued to unfold around her. Metal arms descended from mechanical struts and wrapped cold fingers under her body and turned her over. Too-bright lights swung at her face, blinding her. Searing her vision. Get up, cyran. A voice croaked in the distance. Get up and fight. One of the metal claws started to pull at the liquid arm, trying to prize the metal from flesh. She started to scream.

They need you now. All of them. Listen to me for once in your gods-damned life and fight!

“I can’t,” she screamed as the pressure on her shoulder socket increased.

Then die, that old, familiar voice croaked.

She thought she heard something pop, but she couldn’t tell if it was metal or bone. Her whole world was that single stab of agony in her shoulder.

Redemption! The voice spat. Eolh’s voice, bitter and taunting. You tried, cyran, and you gave up. I guess the voices were right about you all along…

“Fuck you!” she screamed. And she let the rage fuel her. She didn’t know what mad tech held her, but she knew she wasn’t going to let it take her alive.

She wrenched her organic arm, forcing the machines to grip her other side tighter, allowing her to give the liquid arm the space it needed to change. It formed into a blade, and with a screaming growl, she ripped it through one claw, and then rammed it down against all the others that held her. Even as she fell to the floor, she swiped at the forests of new metal fingers grasping for her. More hands descended from the ceiling, and she sliced those too. She chopped and hacked and roared and speared the machines clawing out of the walls as she stormed toward the Gate. She slammed her fist on the console, trying to remember where she was going even as dull pain sloshed her thoughts.

She knew there were trees there, and avians, but the name danced away from her. All she could think of was the Gate on Cyre, but there was no Gate there anymore. There was no—

To my home, he reminded her. To Gaiam.

The smell of wet rainforests and rough feel of towering cliffs. She remembered, and pushed the impulse into the console. The Gate opened, swallowing her whole.

***

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